So...The first Fear Street movie was released on Netflix today and it's...Something. (Spoilers for the opening of the film ahead.)
Things start off well. The movie opens with a shot of Wrong Number by R.L. Stine (or Robert Lawrence in this universe), inside B. Dalton's in the Shadyside Mall. Do you remember when there were still book stores in the mall? That's where I used to buy all my Fear Street books as a kid. It was my favorite part of going to the mall. That's not really what I'm here to talk about though.
Heather is closing up for the night when she's attacked by a person wearing the skeleton mask from the cover of Halloween Night 2. They do a couple laps around the mall before she's stabbed in a scene that looks extremely reminiscent of Drew Barrymore's death in Scream. It's gruesome. Fast forward a bit to an AOL chatroom, where we find out this sort of thing is a normal occurrence in Shadyside and people believe a witch, Sarah Fier, is possessing people and causing them to go on murderous rampages. That's not important. What is important is that I remember AOL chatrooms and if they were striving for realism, they missed the mark because no one ever typed like they were turning in a school paper and every other line was "a/s/l?" or someone running a bot. I'm just saying. I was there. I know.
The beginning of this film builds up the rivalry between the Sunnyvale Devils and the Shadyside Witches (seriously, what happened to the Tigers?) so much that you really believe it's going to play into the plot somehow, but the entire thing is forgotten a half hour into the movie. The only reason I remember it now is because it's written in my notes. Honestly, I got pretty tired of the rivalry between schools pretty early on. They could have made the movie a half hour shorter and saved all of us some time. The actual plot is a bunch of dead mass murderers coming back from the dead to kill a girl because she, through no fault of her own, disturbed Sarah Fier's grave.
Before I really go in on this movie, I will say that it has an epic soundtrack. Garbage? Bush? Staples in every playlist I ever create.
I haven't read any of the Fear Street books in like, 25 years (that's about to change, as you'll see throughout the next several months), but I don't remember them being this dark. I know, people get murdered. All the time. But I still think of them as being kind of innocent. You know, early 90's pre-Dawson's Creek. So watching this movie was a bit jarring.
Fear Street 1994 feels like it tries too hard. At what, I don't even know. Is it trying to be funny? Edgy? Is this what movies made for kids are like now? I know Monster Squad had some very questionable moments in it, but it still felt like a movie made for kids. So if Fear Street isn't aimed at them...Who? It can't be the adults who read the books when they were younger, it doesn't even have the same tone as the books. I don't know who this movie was made for. But it wasn't me. Maybe nostalgia is getting in the way, maybe I'm too old now. But nothing about this felt like Fear Street. It's like they wrote an entirely unrelated movie and then slapped the name on there to draw in fans of the series. A couple costumes and shots of the novels isn't really enough to warrant calling this Fear Street. I mean, they couldn't even leave the mascot alone. I'll watch the other two films, but I'm really disappointed.
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